Read a video instead of watching it
Every public YouTube video with captions has a transcript hiding behind a small button that most viewers never notice. Even when you find it, YouTube shows the text in a cramped sidebar next to the player: you cannot select it all at once, searching inside it is clumsy, and it disappears the moment you click away.
This page takes that same transcript and lays it out properly. The whole text of the video sits in one scrollable view with a timestamp on each line. You can select everything with one shortcut, search it with your browser, copy a quote with its exact time, or download the entire thing as a text file. No account, no fee, no limit on video length.
Shorts, and short-form from elsewhere
A /shorts/ link works here with nothing extra to do. YouTube treats a Short as an ordinary video with a vertical frame, publishes the same caption track for it, and this page reads that track the same way — which is why a sixty-second Short and a two-hour lecture both take about a second. Expect auto-generated captions more often on Shorts, simply because fewer creators correct them.
The platforms that really are different are TikTok and Instagram Reels, which publish no captions at all. Those are transcribed from the audio instead of read from a file, and each has its own page and its own free allowance.
Made for people who work with words
A transcript is often more useful than the video it came from. Researchers cite the exact sentence instead of "around minute 42". Students turn lecture recordings into notes they can actually revise from. Writers quote interviews accurately. Language learners read along while listening, which is one of the fastest ways to train an ear for natural speech.
When the raw text is not enough, the AI buttons under the transcript run on this page. AI summary condenses the video into key points, each carrying the moment it was said; a question about the video is answered from the transcript with the timecode it came from; and a whole list of videos can be processed in one batch on a paid plan. Our Telegram bot is an optional extra for translating a transcript or wrapping it into a PDF. The transcript on this page stays free either way.